The Lull, part 24

Do as I say, not as I do: For years, I've been trying to convince other technical communicators that numbered headings make for poor signposting. You can't look at a chapter number and intuitively know what it's about. And yet I fell into the trap of using a generic name with sequential numbers for my post titles. Bad enough. But then I skipped a number. Eagle-eyed reader SG in California was the first to notice. Glad she did. She's a lawyer, so she had better pay attention to details! So the problem is fixed, and eventually I will leave The Lull and move to more descriptive post titles. Consider it a new year's resolution.

Nadine discovers her roots: Our Fearless Leader helps trace Nadine's family back to the great Rabbi Katz of Chelm.


Sadly, the Fat Girl lacks the dignity and discipline of her ancestors. She is unimpressed by past glories of her lineage. "Tuna me," she says. "Tuna me now."

Why Pugs rock: (Or, why dogs bite people...) MS of Karmiel sent in some great pictures. Halloween or Purim, we don't care; if you have a dog, it is your duty to dress it up in funny costumes and publicly humiliate it at every opportunity. (This is a challenge, because it is extremely difficult to embarrass a dog.)

The tyranny of technology: Bear with me as I indulge in a short rant. Today, for the umpteenth time, I run headlong into bad design. It isn't so much that the technology doesn't support what I want to do, but that no one has actually analyzed the needs of the users to figure out how to design something a little better. Case in point: the anti-spam filter on my ISP consistently flags mail from some list servers and subscription email newsletters as spam. There should be a simple way of bouncing the mail back to the server with the message, "White List" (or "Black List," as the case may be). But noooooo. My email client is only the one of the most commonly used ones out there, but it doesn't reveal header information clearly, so I would have to install a plug-in app and jump through about a dozen hoops that I am not willing to do. So no solution. Even worse, the ISP's lists are universal, which means that when one knucklehead decides that something is spam, everyone gets it filtered out. So suddenly push email from the Jerusalem Post or Strategic Forecasting gets filtered, while endless garbage about burning fat or enhancing certain bedroom activity gets through. Aaaauuuugggghhhh!

Sorry. I feel better now.